Not so fruity at the Vineyard

Retsina is the apotheosis of holiday booze. It travels extremely badly. Generally, it is cheap. It gives you a headache. And it is achingly redolent of the place you have just, so blissfully, visited; so much so that an EC ruling makes it illegal to produce it anywhere outside Greece.

Proper wine lovers pooh-pooh it, but I love the stuff. Whether white or rosé, the pine resin that creates retsina's unique flavour is very palatable. For many years I took a bottle of £2.99 Kourtaki, the most popular retsina in Greece, to parties, safe in the knowledge that when I returned to the drinks table there would be 100 empty bottles of wine and one full bottle of retsina to see me happily through the night.

When I lived in Greece you used to be able to buy a very light retsina in a milk bottle with a pull top from the news kiosks. Once, in a spirit of morning-after-the-night-before celebration, I drank it for breakfast. I have a catalogue of fond, retsinarelated anecdotes, but I'll spare you...

Kourtaki is the retsina available at the Vineyard Taverna, a simple, cheap Greek-Cypriot restaurant on Camberwell Grove - Camberwell's premier tree-lined boulevard. It is a pretty little spot, with an awning sporting real vines and rustic-looking, brightly striped tablecloths. The friend who loves and recommended it says she likes it because she feels like she is in New York, sitting out there on the pavement eating and drinking and talking until all hours. Her boyfriend says he loves it because the staff are friendly.

That may be, but the food is rubbish. My Camberwell chums are both extremely intelligent and I can only assume that their brains are so busy thinking important thoughts that they don't notice that the crab salad is made with shredded crab sticks and tasteless, watery frozen prawns. The beetroot salad is simply cold, boiled beetroot. And the Greek salad has iceberg lettuce in it.

Everything was bland and uninteresting. For the first time in my career as a restaurants reviewer I am going to say, confidently, I could have done better myself.

Two of us, me and Prada Woman, had the fish mezze - a three-course extravaganza at £15 a head. My brother and Knightsbridge Al had, respectively, kleftiko and moussaka.

'Is the hummus home-made?' I asked, in a friendly fashion, the epitome of the patronising English woman abroad, eager to seek out simple tavernas to boast of on her return home.

'Yes, efverythin' is made 'ere in our kitchen,' said the senior staff member, the epitome of the lying local telling the stupid English exactly what they want to hear. As he said this he placed a selection of frozen-then-deep-fried seafood products before me: some stodgy battered calamari, those 'crab claws' which are actually a crab claw stuck into some reconstituted seafood matter (similar to the stuff they make ocean sticks out of) before being covered in breadcrumbs and passed off as the body part of just one marine creature. Now I love ocean sticks, and can eat an entire pack while I walk around the supermarket doing the shopping. But made in their own kitchen? Rubbish, unless throwing them in the deep-fat fryer constitutes 'home-made'. The grilled trout was dry and tasteless. Brother's kleftiko was, yes, meltingly soft and fell off the bone, but it bore no trace of the olive oil, herbs and garlic in which it is meant to be roasted slowly. In fact, you could pick it up off the plate and there was no gravy or juice left behind.

On a good note, my brother said his grilled halloumi, one of his favourite dishes in the whole wide Mediterranean world, was a good example of the squeaky cheese genre. And the toilets had a powerful air freshener, the smell of which I found deeply compelling.